


Thicker Than Water

by wingedspirit



Series: A Blaze of Light [5]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, POV Gabriel (Good Omens), Raphael!Crowley, Redemption arc of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 11:22:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29117457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingedspirit/pseuds/wingedspirit
Summary: After Armageddon is averted, Gabriel loses a home, and then finds a different one.(A story set in the universe of “A Blaze of Light”. If you haven't read the main fic in the series, this will make absolutely no sense.)
Relationships: Crowley & Gabriel (Good Omens), Gabriel & Michael (Good Omens), Gabriel & Uriel (Good Omens)
Series: A Blaze of Light [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1512323
Comments: 24
Kudos: 117
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020, Good Omens (Complete works)





	Thicker Than Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rynne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rynne/gifts).



He notices it first with Michael.

It’s not long after the Healer keeping watch over him is finally satisfied he’s well, and he’s allowed to return to his usual dwelling — though not his usual duties, since he is not an Archangel anymore. He has not seen his siblings at all, except for one brief visit, very early on, when they explained to him what had happened; and he misses them. So he walks into Michael’s office, sits down on the chair in front of her desk and just starts talking, as he usually does. As he always has.

Six thousand years, and she’s never shown any indication this might bother her. But now, instead of picking up the thread of conversation, she pauses in the act of moving a stack of documents and gives him a long, quelling look, the kind he’s seen her give other angels so many times he’s lost count.

It startles him so much he trails off in the middle of a sentence. And, still, she just looks at him, silent, expectant, her eyebrows raised.

“I’m sorry,” he says, awkwardly, after a long pause. “I can see you’re busy.”

“Thank you,” she says, and looks back down at her documents, with the clear expectation that he will leave. And so he does.

He’ll just wait for a time she is less busy, he thinks. She’s his sister. Surely, she will come to see him.

She doesn’t.

* * *

He’s only seen Michael once in the last four weeks, in passing, and Sandalphon is outright avoiding him. He mentions this to Uriel, the next time he sees her — at least she’s still talking to him, though their conversations are rarer and briefer than he’d like — and she stares at him for a moment.

“You understand why, though, don’t you?” she asks.

From the look on her face, it’s clear to him that he ought to. “Of course, of course,” he says.

He doesn’t.

* * *

“Listen,” Uriel tells him, awkwardly, the next time he sees her, a few weeks later. “You should — try, perhaps, to — well. Spend time with other angels. We’re all so busy with — everything, you know?”

He doesn’t know; nobody talks to him, nobody tells him anything. He nods anyway.

Uriel seems to take it as encouragement, and brightens. “I knew you’d understand. Once you are assigned new duties, you will be spending a lot of time with your peers, after all. It makes sense to start befriending them now, right?”

Ah.

* * *

Uriel is avoiding him now, too. And as for his supposed peers —

Well. They do speak to him, when he speaks to them, and they are polite enough; but their answers are curt, even monosyllabic when they can get away with that, and nothing he says or does seems to stop the glances of utter distrust they give him when they think he’s not looking. Entirely too often, all conversation stops abruptly as soon as he walks into a room.

This cannot be borne. He needs to speak to his brother.

* * *

“I need to speak to Raphael,” Gabriel declares firmly, striding into the bookshop.

The dark, cold, empty bookshop.

It makes no sense. Aziraphale is strange, and keeps human hours; and though he does not sleep, he always remains in his bookshop at night, unless ordered to be elsewhere. But he is not here.

Just when Gabriel truly needs him, when he could finally be of use, Aziraphale is not here — and as Gabriel searches for a hint of where he might be, the bookshop grows colder, darker, the feel of it outright hostile.

He knows the trick, of course. He’s used it himself a handful of times, when he had a task to perform on Earth that was too important to leave to someone else and wanted no interruption, from humans or otherwise — but to have it used on him — to have it _work_ on him —

Well. He will just wait outside the bookshop. Aziraphale must return eventually, and then Gabriel will be able to speak to Raphael, and everything will be set right.

* * *

He waits. The sun rises, then sets, then rises again; at some point, it starts raining, a harsh, driving rain that the bookshop entrance provides absolutely no protection from. He is soaked to the skin in seconds. He could use a miracle to shield himself from the rain, of course, but — miracles are tracked, he knows this. They are not always looked at, but anyone with the appropriate rank could check on his miracle ledger. Uriel would, surely, or perhaps even Michael.

They’ve been ignoring him, avoiding him, true, but they are still his siblings. They have been busy, of course, with the restructuring, but they still care about him. They will have realised he’s left Heaven. If they aren’t watching his ledger themselves, they will have assigned someone to the task.

That’s why he can’t use a miracle now; he must not be found. He cannot go back to Heaven, not yet. Once he’s spoken to Raphael, once everything is fixed — then he will return. But once a fresh miracle shows up on his ledger, his siblings will know where he is; and they will come find him. Of course, of _course_ they will come find him. They will. He’s not worried about that. He just can’t let them, that’s all.

He waits.

* * *

It is not Aziraphale who eventually shows up.

In the dim light of the streetlights, Raphael looks exactly as Gabriel remembers him, except for the human clothes; but his brother has never before scowled at him like this, arms crossed, golden eyes cold, mouth a thin line of displeasure. “What do you want, Gabriel?”

“I —” _Get it together_ , Gabriel tells himself. _It’s just Raphael. It’s your brother._ “I need to talk to you,” he manages. “I…” He’d prepared a whole speech, before he even left Heaven; it would have been brief, to the point, and persuasive, like all his speeches usually are. Only now, in the face of his brother’s open hostility, he remembers none of it. “I need your help.”

“Right.” Raphael sighs, and scowls more deeply, and rolls his eyes; but Gabriel doesn’t think he’s imagining the way his expression goes soft, for a moment. “Right, then. Come on.” He turns on his heel and stalks off towards the coffee shop across the road.

Even at this late hour, the place is full of humans, none of whom gives either of them a second glance as they walk to an unoccupied table tucked away in a corner. Raphael pulls out one of the chairs and drops himself into it, not so much sitting as sprawling, and looks him up and down. “Good grief, you look like a drowned rat,” he mutters, and waves a hand; and Gabriel feels the whisper of a miracle running over him, drying him and setting his hair and clothes to rights. “Sit. Talk.”

Gabriel sits, and looks at his brother in silence, trying to gather his thoughts into a coherent form again. His brother Raphael, who he has not seen in six thousand years; and the demon Crowley, Aziraphale’s adversary, who he has seen a handful of times and heard about countless more. It is still difficult, to acknowledge those two beings as one and the same; the brother he has missed, and the demon he encouraged Aziraphale to — oh, God. The brother he could have killed without blinking, without ever even knowing what he was doing.

He shakes his head, and very firmly does not think about Lucifer, the brother whose destruction he has spent six thousand years knowingly and deliberately planning for. One problem at a time; first, the one his brother can help him with. His carefully-crafted speech still has not come back to him, so — “I need you to fix me,” he says, simply.

“Fix you?” Raphael is still frowning; but this is a frown he knows, an expression he’s seen before — incomprehension, not disapproval.

“Yes, obviously.” He frowns at his brother in return, and gestures at himself. “I understand my new status is a consequence of my partial Fall, of course, but you won’t allow that to stand, surely? It’s lasted long enough.”

“I am not sure what you are expecting me to do about it,” Raphael says, slowly.

“Why — you can do the same for me, as you did for yourself. You fixed yourself. You Fell, and you were a lowly demon of no consequence; and now, you are an Archangel again.”

Raphael shakes his head. “I can’t help you.” His frown has smoothed out, changed into something else, yet another expression Gabriel has never seen on his face, something gentle and almost sad.

“Can’t — but I’m your _brother_ ,” Gabriel says, disbelieving.

“You are, and that is why we are even having this conversation. But I cannot fix you; there is nothing to fix. You are not broken. You are who you are. You’re different from what you used to be, but — consequences, as you said. You almost Fell. You almost died. I know my limits, and I almost killed myself trying to save you. There is nothing more I can do.” Raphael’s voice is quiet and even. Gabriel knows that tone — it’s how Raphael used to speak with angels wounded in the first war. He knows it, and he hates it, _hates it_. He doesn’t need his brother to calm him down, he just needs him to _help_.

“No —” His voice almost cracks, and he has to clear his throat. “Nothing?”

“No. You have to understand, Gabriel — it was different, for me; I didn’t really lose anything, when I Fell. I was always — well. An Archdemon, I suppose you would have called me, then. I always had power; I just never cared to have the rank to match. You remember this much of me, surely.”

“But that makes no sense,” Gabriel manages, through the roaring in his ears. It doesn’t. It has to be a lie. Raphael has to be able to help him. If he cannot — “You — you, and Aziraphale. If you always had your power — all those six thousand years, you could have just — he is only a Principality, and you allowed him to — Raphael, why _would_ you? He is so far beneath you.”

Raphael goes completely, utterly still, his face wiped clean of any emotion. “Right,” he says, very softly. “Come to think of it, so are you.”

Gabriel freezes; swallows hard; has to look away. There is no reason he ought to be afraid of his brother, and yet — somehow, right now, he is. “Raphael, I only meant —”

“I know perfectly well what you meant, Gabriel, as do you. I think it’s time for you to go.”

It is not phrased as a direct order, nor is it phrased as a threat; but it carries the weight of both all the same. Unable to look his brother in the eye anymore, left adrift in a world he no longer understands, Gabriel goes.

* * *

He knows he should go back to Heaven.

He doesn’t.

He does not stay in London, nor in Britain; the whole of it feels hostile to him now, almost pulsing with Raphael’s disapproval.

He goes to America instead, purely because he remembers having liked it best out of all the places on Earth, when watching from above; remembers feeling that if any humans might be kindred spirits to him, might be somewhat similar, if in a simpler, more pitiful way, it would be Americans.

Here, too, he feels his brother’s hostility, but it is fainter, more distant; he can tolerate it. What he cannot tolerate, though —

The country is as he remembers it; the humans, too; and yet, he finds both unbearable. Anywhere he goes, he feels — small. Different. Wrong.

_You are not broken_ , his brother had said — but what would he know? He had, after all, always been himself. Had never lost anything.

No human sees him unless he wants to be seen, of course, but he avoids them nevertheless. He leaves the large cities he had once thought he enjoyed behind, and wanders.

One day, on a road just like all the others, on the edge of a tiny town just like all the others, there is a dog, filthy, half-starved, with a broken leg. It sees him, somehow, and cries out piteously to him, and he uses a miracle, entirely thoughtlessly, to help it.

For days, after, he waits, running a speech over and over in his mind, an explanation for the questions his siblings will surely ask, an account of why he has wasted so much time on Earth. He knows what they will likely say — it will be, he expects, very similar to what he has said to Aziraphale a thousand, thousand times. He can almost hear Michael’s voice, demanding, _A dog, Gabriel? Really?_

He waits. Nobody comes.

* * *

He wanders; the dog follows, in spite of his best efforts to dissuade it. It turns its nose up at the food he miracles up for it, so he uses another miracle to create some human currency, instead, and walks into the next supermarket he sees.

The human at the checkout counter looks down at the dog, then looks back up and smiles at him. “What a lovely fellow,” he says. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” he says, thrown.

The human nods, as if that makes perfect sense. “Just got him, did you? Don’t worry, it’ll come to you.”

It won’t, Gabriel is quite sure. He’s just taking care of the dog temporarily, after all.

* * *

He wanders; the dog follows. His last attempt to get rid of the dog involved distracting him with a thrown stick and then miracling himself to the other side of a small river. The dog grabbed the stick, swam across the river, dropped the stick at Gabriel’s feet, gleefully rolled into the dirt and then stood on his hind legs to lick at Gabriel’s face, getting mud all over him. That was a month ago; he hasn’t tried anything else since.

“What’s his name?” yet another cashier asks, as Gabriel is paying for yet another bag of dog food.

Gabriel sighs. “Bother,” he says.

* * *

He wanders; he helps where he can, sometimes with his paltry supply of miracles, more often the human way. It is not too bad on Earth after all, he’s found. It has been years since his conversation with his brother Raphael, years since he has last spoken with another angel, and he likes it this way. He’s starting to think he might even like to settle down somewhere.

* * *

A week to the day after Gabriel has bought his house, Aziraphale shows up at his door. Gabriel shuts the door in his face, then thinks better of it, and opens it again. “Would you like to come in?” he asks, stiffly. “I was just about to have lunch.”

Aziraphale’s eyebrows go up so high they nearly hit his hairline, but he appears to recover quickly from his surprise, masking it with politeness instead. “I couldn’t possibly impose,” he says. “A restaurant, perhaps?”

They go to a restaurant; they eat; they talk.

Were the both of them human, Gabriel thinks, he would probably begin with an apology; or, were he as callous and blind still as he used to be, he might justify himself by saying it had not been personal, that it had been how everyone was treated, that he had not known how wrong it was until he had found himself on the receiving end of it. But, in truth, he had known — or, at the least, he should have known, should have figured it out by himself, long before Raphael had shut him out for it; and there is no apology sufficient for six thousand years of ill treatment, no way to make up for all the wrong he has done. So, instead, he tells Aziraphale about his life, and his new house; about his dog; about the things he has tried, and the humans he has befriended.

Over the appetisers, and the main course, and dessert, Gabriel talks, and Aziraphale listens; and then, when they are done, Aziraphale finally tells him why he has come. Apparently, Gabriel has been assigned duties, and a supervisor — a subordinate of Michael, of course. Apparently, his new supervisor has shown up at the bookshop, demanding to know Gabriel’s location so she may direct him to return to Heaven posthaste.

He should’ve known it was too good to last. He understands a little better, now, how Aziraphale might’ve felt, the past six thousand years.

“I could have told her where you are, of course,” Aziraphale is saying, “but I thought it might be — kinder, if I came to find you, instead.”

Kinder. Right. “She knows full well where I am, you realise. Michael would have told her. It’s just one of her games.”

Aziraphale gives him a flat, even look. “Of course I realise. I just wasn’t certain whether you would.”

Gabriel can’t help it; he laughs, a little hysterically. “Weren’t you? I played those same games with you for thousands of years, Aziraphale. I know you know how this works.”

Another long, inscrutable look; then Aziraphale sighs. “What are you doing here, Gabriel? What do you want?”

It’s a strange question; a mirror, almost, of what Raphael had asked him, the last time they saw each other. “I don’t know,” he says, honestly. “I had hoped I might be able to find out.”

Aziraphale hums consideringly, and folds his napkin, and stands. “Well, then. Come along.”

Gabriel follows as Aziraphale walks to the back of the restaurant and holds open the restroom door, looking expectantly at him. The doorframe shimmers with power, clearly marking it as a gateway of some sort; it’s not something Aziraphale used to be able to do, but, clearly, things have changed. Shrugging, Gabriel walks through and, as expected, finds himself in Aziraphale’s bookshop.

Raphael is sprawled out on the sofa, to all appearances entirely focused on a portable electronic device; loud, cheerful music is playing, accompanied by various game noises. An angel is standing nearby, looking distinctly uncomfortable. He doesn’t know her name, but he has seen her around Michael before; she is, he thinks, a Power, but he isn’t certain. He cannot quite work out angels’ power levels at a glance anymore.

The angel looks him up and down. “Angel Gabriel, I am —”

“Hush, Mahariel,” Raphael says, cutting her off, mild but firm.

The angel — Mahariel, apparently — immediately falls silent, without protest. At Gabriel’s side, Aziraphale smothers a laugh.

The music gets more frantic, the game noises more frequent; after several long, awkward minutes, a triumphant little fanfare plays, and Raphael switches the device off. “You were saying?”

Mahariel clears her throat. “Angel Gabriel, I am the Principality Mahariel. I have been assigned by the Archangel Michael as your direct supervisor, and have been sent to facilitate your immediate return to Heaven, so that you may begin your new duties. I understand you may feel reluctant to abandon your current position, but you may rest assured that your new role has been chosen especially for you, and you will receive all the support you may require.”

Raphael pulls a face. “Right,” he says. “Gabriel? Thoughts?”

Gabriel just shakes his head. He doesn’t want to go, but he has no say in the matter; he knows this, and so does his brother. “I have — had — a dog,” he says, instead. “If you could find someone who would take care of him, I would be grateful.”

Raphael’s eyebrows go up. “A dog,” he says, looking almost — delighted.

“His name is Bother,” Aziraphale puts in, cheerfully.

Raphael cackles, levering himself to his feet in a single, sinuous motion. “Sounds about right. Well — separating a dog from his owner, that would be cruel. We can’t have that, can we?”

Gabriel stares. He can’t mean —

“Unfortunately, that is what must happen.” Mahariel sounds like she is very close to altogether losing her patience. “Gabriel has been reassigned. The Archangel Michael was quite clear that —”

“Oh, she was, was she?” All traces of amusement are gone from Raphael’s face. “Unfortunately, the Archangel Michael appears to have forgotten that she holds no authority here. Or, perhaps, she remembered, and hoped that the fact that I hold no love for Gabriel might keep me from challenging her. Either way, it makes no difference.”

“But —”

“It’s not up for debate. Gabriel will not be returning to Heaven, until and unless he wishes to. If Michael has a problem with this, she is more than welcome to come down here and tell me so herself.”

Mahariel looks as if she is prepared to object again, then very clearly thinks better of it. “Yes, Archangel Raphael. My apologies for the misunderstanding.” She bows, and vanishes.

His brother makes a discontented noise, and flings himself backwards to sprawl gracelessly on the sofa again, eyes closed. “One of these days, I am going to put out a Heaven-wide bulletin, letting everyone know what my actual name is.”

Aziraphale chuckles. “And everyone will still call you Raphael.”

His brother snorts. “Yeah, probably.”

_His actual name_ , Gabriel thinks. If he doesn’t want to be called Raphael, then — “Crowley.”

His brother cracks his eyes open and glares at him. “I still don’t like you.”

Gabriel nods. “That’s fair. Still — thank you.”

“Eh. Don’t mention it. Shoo, go on, get back to your dog.” Crowley waves his hand, vaguely. “Front door’ll get you there. And Gabriel?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you find out,” Crowley says, very quietly.

Find out? What —

Oh. 

_What do you want, Gabriel?_

Gabriel smiles. “I will.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is, alas, incredibly late; I intended to have it finished much sooner, but then I got 2020'd. It's been a year, y'all, and I'm still struggling creatively. On the upside, I do think the story turned out to be better for it; I was originally planning to be quite a bit more unkind to Gabriel in it... but given the current state of the world, I didn't have the heart.
> 
> The coffee shop near Aziraphale's bookshop is shown [on the street plan posted by Douglas Mackinnon](https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1256304956392562690); the Principality Mahariel, on the other hand, I made up out of whole cloth, and any resemblance to an existing angel's name, if one such exists, is entirely coincidental.
> 
> Crowley was playing [Tetris 99](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_99) — mostly to annoy Mahariel, really, but he does enjoy the game. He only very occasionally cheats.
> 
> As ever, you can find me on [Tumblr](https://wingedspirit.tumblr.com/). Although I have lately been slacking on reblogging, I continue to have a Good Omens problem.


End file.
